Star Trek: Bridge Commander Impressions

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By Ivan Sulic

What person could forget some of the cherished Christmas dinners from their past? I remember one of mine quite vividly... With my ship on fire and steam erupting out of places that just shouldn't have piping, I was pinned down by multiple targets from several angles. It was then that I turned professional and fell back on my Academy training from Old Admiral McCheese (my youth was filled with strange hallucinatory daydreams that combined many staples of American pop culture). I'll show those dirty Cardies for what they've done! They're no match for my Galaxy class starship! It's usually right about then that mom would step in and urge me to stop hurtling chicken legs at my siblings while accusing them of being "filthy spoon head collaborators." Ah youth, if only I could be 19 again...

Star Trek has that enamoring quality to it. The shows effortlessly hypnotize and captivate the geeky, lonely, daydreaming, and games editors of the world (the latter being a mix of the former three and some kind of enchilada). Plenty of ST games have come down the pipe, but judging from a very polished beta version I've recently had the pleasure of running, Lawrence Holland and Totally Games' Bridge Commander already seems well in line to claim its throne as the game most indicative and representative of the Trek experience to yet come.

I'm not one for talk. Any Romulan I sees is a Romulan I kills. Klingon wenches encroaching on my sphere of influence are Klingon wenches well on their way to Sto-Vo-Kor. From what I've played, Bridge Commander appears to cater to me and the other action hungry Michael Dudikoffs of the world by engulfing us in a steady stream of combat. But, it's apparent the game also takes great pride in developing, delivering, and maintaining a very Trek, very apparently cohesive experience.

As a whole, BC is graphically a real marvel. Just from the screens you can clearly behold the borderline real, brilliant ship models (the Galaxy class of vessel being my personal favorite). Provided you have the system to crunch the title, there will come a time when you'll unquestionably lose yourself in the experience and mistake one of the external transitional scenes of your ship entering or exiting a system as a piece of the actual show. So maybe it's not that good, but you get the idea -- or at least you will when you play it.

As impressive as the immense planetary bodies, stars and space stations that inhabit this universe are, I believe it¿s the soft, colorful and rich lighting that will ultimately escalate the game visually. Ambient glows are cast on everything by everything, creating a thick, solid, and engrossed overall look and feel. There's even an option to toggle an "enhanced glow" on or off. This creates a more volumetric look to the lights (pleasant in stills), but during play I found the crisper, non-enhanced lights to be preferable. Fuzzy or not, the option exists, and is kind of a neat effect to play around with (I took a couple of comparison screens with it on, and with it off so you can see what's up with what's going down).

I can already envision a lot of people indubitably glancing at the aesthetics of the bridge component of Bridge Commander and reeling back in disgust. It may not look like the absolute pinnacle of graphical achievement, but what has to be understood is that the view screen is a real-time portal to the outer world. If you learn to put it in its proper context, you can begin appreciate that you're in actuality still given all that's around you, but are now also made privy to the inner happenings of the ship. Agreed, the facial animations could be a little less like a ventriloquist's puppet, but it's doubtful that'll change by release.

Spoiled on the fiction as I am, I did develop a few personal points of contention with some of the minor explosions and phaser effects to be found throughout. But it's hard to tell which of these bratty gripes can be attributed to the beta and which are inherent to design. None of my whiny complaints in this department should really debilitate or otherwise disadvantage the final product anyway, so whatever.